General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture

with ever-increasing pleasure and profit. They ever find treasures new and old. They understand the secret of grace. They know how to extract it from the varied forms in which it is enveloped. They explore the deepest mines and bring forth lustrous gems of truth. They climb the highest peaks and rapturously gaze on the vast territories of their Lord. With the Psalmist they exclaim :

O how I love thy instruction!—it is my meditation all the day.

How sweet are thy words unto my taste!-sweeter than honey to my mouth! I love thy commandments above gold, — yea above fine gold.

The sum of thy word is truth, and everlasting all thy righteous judgments. 1

3. The grace of God in Holy Scripture can be fully appropriated only by practising faith. Our Saviour taught His disciples: "If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself."2 Experiment is ever the victor of doubt. Faith is tested by practice. Abraham's faith was proved by his willingness to sacrifice his well-beloved son. Mere faith is seeming faith, a shadow, a dead vanity. A real, genuine, living faith apprehends and uses divine grace. The grace of God is effectual. It is dynamic in its application of redemption. It is no less dynamic after it has been appropriated by man. The light of the world lights up Christian lamps. The water of life becomes in the believer a fountain, from which shall flow rivers of living water.3 The grace of God is made effectual by "laying it up in our hearts and practising it in our lives." The grace of God becomes a grace of experience. Unless the divine grace continue to flow forth from a man in his life and conduct, the source of supply is stopped. A reservoir which has no outlet will have no incoming waters. A lamp that does not burn will not be able to receive fresh supplies of oil.

From this two things follow:

(a) If a Christian man would use the Scriptures as a means of grace, he must continually put them in practice in his heart and life. If the Church would apprehend more and more the riches of the grace of Jesus Christ contained in the Scriptures,

1 Ps. 11997. 103. 127. 160

2 John 717.

3 John 788.

it must become a more practical, earnest, Christ-like Church. The source of supply from the reservoir Scripture is feeble because the outflowing of grace from Christian men and women is feeble.

(b) Christians become secondary sources of supply. The Word of God, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, when appropriated by the Christian, assimilated to his needs, transformed into his life, does not cease to be the Gospel of the grace of God. The external form has been changed, but the internal substance of grace is the same. The Word of God does not cease to be the Word of God when wrapped in other than Scripture language. Hence it is that the Christian becomes a living epistle of God,1 and the Church, as a body of such epistles, a means of grace, conveying the divine grace in another form to the world. is ever the grace of God that is the effectual divine force, and not the form in which for the time it may be enveloped. Happy the Church when its ministers have become more really such living epistles, written with the Spirit of the living God! Blessed will that time be, when the entire membership of the Church shall become such epistles, when Christ, who so loved the Church and gave Himself for it, shall have sanctified it, having cleansed it by the washing of water with the Word ! 2 Then will the ancient prophecy be realized.3

Lo, days are coming, is the utterance of Yahweh,

When I will conclude with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, a new covenant;

Not according to the covenant that I concluded with their fathers

In the day of my strengthening their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt;

Which covenant with me they did break, although I was lord over them, is the utterance of Yahweh.

For this is the covenant that I will conclude with the house of Israel after

those days, is the utterance of Yahweh :

I do put my instruction within them, and upon their heart will I write it; And I will become a God for them, and they will become a people for me; And they will not teach any more, each his friend, and each his brother, saying, "Know Yahweh";

For all of them will know me, from the least even to the greatest of them, is the utterance of Yahweh.

For I will pardon their iniquity, and their sins I will not remember any